“Geographically-relevant information” is generally used to describe information that has the potential to be useful to someone at a particular physical location. For example, geographically-relevant information may include business locations, weather conditions, traffic conditions, safety information, street/road topologies, upcoming speed limit changes, points of interest, naturally occurring physical structures, etc.
While there are known systems that provide geographically-relevant information to vehicle operators, such systems suffer from two drawbacks. First, they are typically limited to providing geographically-relevant information based only on the vehicle's current position. This is disadvantageous because the driver may not have sufficient time to react to the information (e.g., location of a gas station, road conditions, etc.) before it is too late.
An improvement on the above system that some modern in-vehicle navigation systems have realized is to use destination information entered by the vehicle operator to access geographically-relevant information. However, requiring the vehicle operator to enter such destination information is tedious and distracting. And in cases where the driver has not taken the trouble to enter any destination information, at best the driver will only be able to access information that is potentially relevant to the vehicle's then-current position.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method of automatically presenting path-relevant information to a vehicle operator based on a predicted route.